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Contemporary Environmental Art in China: Portraying Progress, Politics, and

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Contemporary Environmental art in China:

Portraying Progress, Politics, and Ecosystems

Elizabeth Ann Brunner

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ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2016.1269822

Contemporary Environmental art in China: Portraying Progress,

Politics, and Ecosystems
Elizabeth Ann Brunner
Department of Communication, Media, and Persuasion, Idaho State University, Pocatello, ID, USA

ABSTRACT ARTICLE HISTORY

Art has long been an important force in environmental movements. In Received 5 November 2015
China, environmental art is a fast-growing sector of the art scene. This Accepted 2 May 2016
new area of emphasis is expanding the function of art and aiding in
KEYWORDS
China’s environmental movement by challenging both imported Social movements;
Western practices and Maoist era philosophy, thereby opening up new environmental art; China;
ways of considering the relationship between human “progress,” territorialization; visual
political systems, economic practices, and their repercussions on existing rhetoric
ecosystems. I turn to artist Xu Xiaoyan’s paintings to explore how the
notion of “progress” can be challenged through art. I use Deleuze and
Guattari’s theory of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to map how
Xu’s art offers viewers space to think outside dominant paradigms,
creates the potential for changes in human consciousness, considers the
environment as a composition of relationships and interactions, and
provokes discussion concerning the impact of linear notions of time on
human conceptions of nature.

China is currently facing numerous dire environmental issues. The country’s dependence on coal
and widespread manufacturing has sent levels of the particulate matter believed to be responsible
for lung damage and cancer—PM 2.5—soaring. Beijing, Tianjin, Harbin, and numerous other cities’
PM 2.5 levels often exceed the Environmental Protection Agency’s standard for “good” quality air
(50 PM 2.5 and below) and sometimes exceed measurable levels altogether (500 PM 2.5 and
above). Though air pollution receives a great deal of press coverage, it is not China’s only problem.
The runoff from dyeing, chemical, and fertilizer factories has put water sources in jeopardy. Research
on water quality has proven frightening: “According to one report, ‘up to 40 percent of China’s rivers
were seriously polluted’ and ‘20 percent were so polluted their water quality was rated too toxic even
to come into contact with’” (Economy, 2013, para. 1). China’s soil, too, has become an issue of great
concern as toxic metals are leached into farmlands via open mines and industrial sites. In a recent
study, “nearly 5,000 soil samples [were taken] from vegetable plots across China” and “roughly a
quarter of the sampled areas were polluted” (Larson, 2014, para. 2). These problems are not China’s
alone, but a global issue that is influenced, affected by, and affects the US.
This connection between the US and China is evidenced in recent research, which has increas-
ingly made clear that pollution knows no political borders (Marks, 2012; Shapiro, 2012). For
example, US-owned textile manufacturing companies in China produce chemicals that travel inside
the fibers of exported clothing only to be released into waterways around the world when washed.
Toxic e-waste exported from the US is to blame for contaminating China’s agricultural areas and
endangering domestic food supplies. Smog belched from factories producing inexpensive goods
for export to the US (and other countries) in China’s coastal cities is falling in the form of acid

CONTACT Elizabeth Ann Brunner betsyabrunner@gmail.com

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
2 E. A. BRUNNER

rain across California (Wong, 2014). The environment, health, and well-being of the US and China
are inextricably intertwined in ways never before imagined. The problems we are facing are simul-
taneously local and global and require not one, but many creative solutions as well as a better under-
standing of how the Chinese people are conceptualizing and dealing with these issues.
One way to begin understanding how people and the government in China are conceptualizing
and struggling with environmental degradation is to look to art. We know that in the US, “images are
clearly central to the practice of environmental politics today, and, arguably, have been since Carlton
Watkins’ 1861 landscape photographs” (DeLuca, 1999, p. xii). Artistic images are no less important
in China—a place where the artistic boom has grown in tandem with environmental crises. Since
1990, China has risen from a 0.4% share of the market to become the second largest art market
in the world after the US. Art can open space for the transformation of the ideographs of mainstream
society.
Since DeLuca’s (1999) publication, select authors have investigated the role of images in environ-
mental movements and awareness-raising in the US including Cox (2013), Demo (with DeLuca,
2000), Delicath (with DeLuca, 2003), Hansen and Machin (2013), Peeples (2011, 2013), Schwarz
(2013), Solnit (2007), Bergman (2012), and Spurlock (2012). This research has functioned to expand
communication by studying the visual and further interrogating its role in social movements. How-
ever, scholars have not yet thoroughly explored the role of visual rhetoric in constructing and com-
municating the environment in China, nor have they thoroughly considered Chinese art as a means
to create movement that can disrupt the anthropocentrism contributing to vast environmental
destruction in China. With a quickly blossoming environmental art scene, grassroots organizations
rapidly spreading across China, thousands of environmental protests occurring every year, and the
realization that our environment is globally interconnected, the situation in China is in dire need of
examination. Research that studies how the environment and attendant crises are being conceptu-
alized is important in developing a productive cross-cultural dialogue and uniting important players
on both sides of the globe.

Landscapes of consumption
Not until the twentieth century did the Chinese develop a word (ziran) that mirrored the Western
notion of nature as a world separate from humanity, meaning the Chinese people likely saw land, the
cosmos, and humans as part of interrelated systems rather than nature as “other.” This relationship
changed when Mao initiated a “war on nature,” which separated humans from their surroundings
(Shapiro, 2001). The subsequent shift to capitalism in the 1980s and embrace of consumerism
further distanced humans from “nature” and exacerbated environmental degradation. The struggle
with the changing human–nature relationship is evident in a new wave of art found in galleries and
art districts across China.1 Xu Xiaoyan’s series of oil paintings titled, The Views (2005–2009), con-
sists of dozens of paintings that challenge capitalist practices to make room for considering how Chi-
na’s changing economic system and increased consumption are impacting Beijing’s environment as
well as China’s environment in general. Xu’s paintings record the morphing landscape of Beijing as it
moves from hutongs2 to high rises. Over the past two decades, Beijing has grown at an unprece-
dented pace. The city is a series of moving construction sites, and the massive changes occurring
inspired Xu to become an independent painter. Her work has garnered both national and inter-
national attention. Xu was awarded a “Golden Prize” at the third Annual Exhibition of Chinese
Oil Paintings, and in 1999, Xu received the US Freeman Art Foundation Award before she died
of lung cancer in 2013.
Xu’s paintings were directly inspired by the transformations she witnessed as the edges of Beijing
grew ever outward. Xu visited the noisy cluttered construction sites to document the movement of
this so-called progress, where spaces were being bulldozed to make way for buildings and roads and
where industrialization, urbanization, and expansion were often framed as good. As DeLuca states,
such a “[b]elief in progress is contemporary common sense” (1999, p. 46). This notion that
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 3

widespread development is a step forward for humans is deeply problematic and based on an anthro-
pocentric model. Smith terms this the hegemony of productivism (1998). Smith defines productivism
as “an expansionistic, growth-oriented ethic” that refers “to a discourse that embodies a wide collec-
tion of beliefs, practices, concepts, and sedimented structures” (1998, p. 10). For Smith,
It is neither possible nor necessary to exhaust the content or totalitarian character of productivist discourse. It is
the air we breathe. It is the blood in our veins. Its boundaries are in constant flux, even if we do not have a
general sense of what is included and what is not. This flux is a function of the constant struggle with challenges
to the hegemony of productivism. (1998, pp. 10–11)

Indeed, with China’s adoption of capitalism, has come this infiltrating hegemony of productivism—a
space of striation in which people are funneled into conceptualizing humanity on a linear pro-
gression via construction and consumption.
Using a variety of artistic techniques, styles, and subjects, Xu complicates the concept of progress
for her viewers by placing the hegemony of productivism into question. Her work offers glimpses into
the outskirts of Beijing as well as the messiness of expansion and progress that few people witness. This
journey leads people into a middle space where they are forced to view the violence of progress and
where landscapes are neither “natural” nor urbanized. In this in-between space of movement viewers
are given the opportunity to contemplate the impacts of development and industrialization on Beijing,
which leaves room for thinking anew. While urban Chinese are aware of environmental problems
such as air pollution, they are less attuned to the connection between it and urban expansion. There-
fore, what needs to be brought to city dweller’s attention is the fact that an ever-expanding Beijing’s
impact on the environment is dependent upon coal-fired steel factories, semi-trucks, and heavy equip-
ment, which all impact air quality as much as or more than automobiles.
Xu works from the margins, where China’s turn toward consumption leads to littered landscapes.
In order to demonstrate how Xu creates space for new imaginings, I focus on the tensions evident in
three different themes in her work—refuse, construction sites, and time. Xu’s images of refuse chal-
lenge the adoption of consumptive practices by exposing the debris of productivism, while the con-
struction sites illustrate how the scale of China’s urbanization impacts landscapes. Her work that
deals with time offers insight into how the sense of cyclical time inherent in the Chinese culture
can disrupt the embrace of linear progress.

From the serene sublime to destructive construction

Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams, who painted and photographed awe-filled confrontations with
the sublime landscapes of the American West, played no small part in convincing Congress to “save”
Yellowstone and Yosemite (DeLuca & Demo, 2000). As people move from encountering transcendent
landscapes to encountering environmental catastrophes, a major shift in art is apparent—from sharing
the sublime to facing crises. For example, Edward Burtynsky’s large-format photographs capturing
“terrible beauties” force viewers to confront waste in the form of walls of tires rather than the steep
granite splendor of El Capitan, which Peeples (2011) calls “the toxic sublime.” In a similar vein,
Chris Jordan, in his Intolerable Beauties series, captures vast expanses of discarded cell phones, e-
waste, and spent ammunition casings to draw attention to the byproducts of consumer culture.
This trend developed differently in China. Due to the restrictions on artistic expression during
Mao’s regime, the art world was largely suppressed from 1949 through the early 1980s until Deng
Xiaoping initiated China’s opening up. Over the course of the next two decades, the number of artists
in China grew alongside environmental degradation. Thus, while dynastic art often featured serene
landscapes, when the art scene was revived post-Mao, painters and photographers found that these
natural landscapes had been altered by Mao’s policies and the subsequent rapid economic growth.
Thus, the artwork produced reflected not awe, but a panicked exigency, as is the case with Xu’s work.
Art and its rhetorical force are crucial aspects to consider in the growing discussion of the
environment in China for three main reasons. First, art is always political (Rancière, 2010). Art is
4 E. A. BRUNNER

and has been used extensively in propaganda movements, campaigns, and military recruitment in
numerous countries including the US and China. Second, art is and has been an important force
in environmental movements around the globe. Art is used to spread information, document abuses
and grandeur, and provoke contemplation by encouraging new ways of considering degradation,
crises, and protection. Finally, China’s central government has invested heavily in contemporary
Chinese art over the past decade (Chen, 2007), which has created space for a burgeoning contem-
porary art scene, created platforms for people to put forth new ideas about the environment, and
opened up new means of communicating across cultures. If we want to better understand the assem-
blage of environmental issues facing China, we cannot but turn to art. This move affords scholars a
window into the ways in which notions of the environment are changing. Furthermore, environ-
mental advocates can use scholarly studies of art to help develop local and global strategies that
can forge new pathways for thinking about our resources in much the same way people have
used Ansel Adams’ work to forge pathways toward preservation practices.
Xu Xiaoyan’s landscape paintings are an appropriate place to turn because they are some of the
first examples of environmentally focused art in China. While landscape paintings have functioned
historically in China as an escape from the chaos of dynastic collapse, an expression of the harmony
between humans and nature, and a vehicle for self-expression, contemporary landscape art like Xu’s
reflects a confrontation with industry-related pollution. Landscape paintings are politically impor-
tant in contemporary discussions of the environment because, as Mitchell (1995) states, they are rep-
resentations “in which cultural meanings and values are encoded” (p. 14).
To explore how Xu Xiaoyan questions the impacts of “progress” for an audience primed to accept
progress as a super slogan, I weave together an analysis of her series titled “The Views,” interviews
with the artist, and the writings of a collection of Chinese art critics who have analyzed her work. I
use Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization to map how Xu’s
work disrupts industrialization as progress to create room for new ways of thinking about China’s,
and more specifically Beijing’s, urbanization.3

Moving landscapes
Deleuze and Guattari’s (1987) concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization engage the
constant translation of space from striated to smooth back to striated and so forth, thereby providing
scholars a means to map movement and change. In this case study, they function to illustrate how art
can encourage new and productive patterns of thought that challenge consumptive practices and
industrial progress to open up space for thinking the environment anew by emphasizing movement,
challenging binaries, and creating rifts in human notions of time.4 These concepts fall within Deleuze
and Guattari’s larger mapping project in A thousand plateaus, which challenge the architectures of
thought that have for so long undergirded philosophy and thinking including binaries, the tree, the
book, linguistics, the body, and so forth. In their place, Deleuze and Guattari offer the rhizome,
assemblages, shifting meanings, and bodies without organs. Their mapping project is not something
that seeks stability, but instead underscores movement and “constant modification … . The map has
to do with performance” and relationships (1987, p. 12). Maps, for Deleuze and Guattari, are not
stable but amorphous. They allow viewers to enter from multiple points. They are a form of explora-
tion, which implies shifting change that intersects with different assemblages.
In their discussion of “The Aesthetic Model: Nomad Art,” which is a prolonged foray into their notion
of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, Deleuze and Guattari begin by discussing the smooth and
striated. Though neatly divided into two words, one is never without the other. Rather, they are con-
stantly encroaching upon one another. The smooth is defined as “both object of a close vision par excel-
lence and the element of a haptic space” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 493). It combines senses and is a
place of openness. One can get lost in smooth spaces where the terrain and time lie unstructured. They
turn to the artist to elaborate, for the artist who paints at close range, is “in” the smooth space, unable to
step back from, for example, the painting in which s/he is engaged. Despite some notions to the contrary,
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 5

artists do not necessarily have a concrete vision for what the painting or sculpture they are creating will
become. They are exploring. This moment of creation represents a space full of potential new connec-
tions to different assemblages and lines of flight. It is not a thing, but a becoming, a “lack of direction” in
which possibilities are limitless and human constructions of time and space are amorphous. Striated
space, on the other hand, “relates to a more distant vision, and a more optical space” that “is defined
by the requirements of long-distance vision: constancy of orientation, invariance of distance” (Deleuze
& Guattari, 1987, pp. 493–494). Striated space is marked by context and is “grounded”; it is not as unin-
hibited and messy as smooth space. It can be seen and is more stable. Striated space could be described as
having structures of thought imposed upon it such as linear time. If smooth spaces represent the middle,
striated space represents the ends, where lines of delineation have been drawn and pathways established.
Striation inevitably encroaches upon smooth spaces.
Deleuze and Guattari explicitly note that smoothing and striating are not to be conceived of in
terms of good and bad. To do so would limit the concepts. Deleuze and Guattari are more interested
in “operations of striation and smoothing … how forces at work within space continually striate it, and
how in the course of its striation it develops other forces and emits new smooth spaces” (1987, p. 500,
emphasis added). In other words, movement is key to smoothing and striating, to deterritorialization
and reterritorialization, to breaking and building alliances. Striated spaces are always in the process of
becoming-smooth before becoming-striated. This concept becomes a valuable way to approach art,
because one of the functions of art is not to be read “correctly,” but to incite conversations that create
movements of thoughts and relationships. Viewers who enter the space around a canvas (or sculpture
or performance) create a viewer–canvas–painter assemblage (that links to the economy, history,
painting, the environment, and so on). As viewers enter this assemblage, they encounter a particular
space that contains both smoothnesses and striations that, through the movement of contemplation,
forge other connections as well as potential smoothnesses and striations. For example, the viewer may
enter an assemblage through a field of striated-becoming-smooth in which they bring their own ideas
and presumptions, which are then challenged by the artwork, thereby offering smoothnesses by which
to think anew. It is through this contemplation that the viewer’s thinking can then become striated
again. In this essay, I will map Xu’s art as a process wherein viewers are drawn into an assemblage
where striated spaces are interrupted and the smoothing spaces challenge existing striations (or
ways of thinking) to create new connections between themselves and their environment, economy,
traditions, and government. It is in this movement between smooth and striated that possibilities
for understanding how new definitions and conceptions of the environment arise, and how these
new definitions may change the trajectory of China’s environmental movement.
This essay extends Deleuze and Guattari’s notions of smooth and striated by applying it to a case
study in which I preserve movement by focusing on how Xu’s paintings interrupt productivism, or
dominant anthropocentric ways of thinking. In so doing, I am mapping the potential for change, or
what McGee (1980) calls the movement of the social via changes in human consciousness. Second, in
treating space “as the product of interrelations, as constituted through interactions” (Massey, 2005,
p. 9) that moves between smoothnesses and striations, I am offering environmental scholars another
way to move past nature/culture dualisms and rethink the environment as a composition of relation-
ships and interactions. Third, I am exploring how art serves as an “indirect strategy [that] effectively
places the dominant powers outside the usual categories of space and time” (Deleuze & Guattari,
1987, p. 231). A linear notion of time, which “belongs to the forces of modernization and develop-
ment,” is one striation that can be interrupted and smoothed to challenge prevailing notions of pro-
gress (Grebowicz, 2014, p. 8).

Refuse: interrupting productivism

The detritus of progress is an important component in Xu’s art, and its inclusion helps to pull view-
ers out of “the use of ‘progress’ as a super slogan, [which is] very efficacious as a public anaesthetic”
(Lanier, 2006, p. 123). In Xu’s work, “progress” precipitates problems. For example, in Wangjing
6 E. A. BRUNNER

Street mounds of trash and debris dominate the foreground. In the dark background a shopping cen-
ter and construction crane emerge, and even further back, skyscrapers. Wangjing is an international
business center in Beijing and, at the time of Xu’s painting, was an expansion beyond China’s fourth
ring road. The scene is set against a darkening sky. Despite the apparent lack of natural light, the
debris is painted in vivid cerulean blues, vibrant reds, and canary yellows. The trash is embedded
in and surrounded by various shades of brown and ochre mud. Xu’s work depicts the vastness of
the landscape, provoking viewers to oscillate between the beauty of the visual components and
the reality of the image—to inhabit the space of striated-becoming-smooth-becoming-striated in
which the construction that accompanies progress has immediate material consequences.
Similarly, Xu’s series of four paintings depicting a small stream titled Caochangdi No. 1, 2, 3, and 4
each depict trash that is so tangled up in the sticks on the streambed that the natural and artificial are
inseparable. In Caochangdi No. 2, a stream portrayed in a beautiful blue–green hue cuts through the
canvas. Bare trees grow on the banks where discarded paper and trash hug their trunks. This scene
sits on the background of a dark gray sky. No humans can be seen; only remnants of them remain in
the form of rubbish. Xu’s treatment of the landscape as simultaneously barren, trashed, and tranquil
creates space for considering this environment in the aftermath of consumptive behaviors that inter-
rupts productivism. This communal trash, a byproduct of disposable lifestyles, comes from every-
where. Xu brings the outskirts to her viewers, offering people an opportunity to reflect on the
magnitude and depth of one of Beijing’s environmental issues—trash.
By bringing these paintings into galleries in the heart of Beijing and aestheticizing objects typically
deliberately rendered invisible, Xu is inverting the flow of trash from the center to the outskirts and
disrupting the striated space of progress in which the flow of people from rural spaces to urban high
rises is “good” and the adoption of capitalist lifestyle is seen as a step forward. Her work challenges
the automatic adoption of the myth that “progress” is a positive trajectory for China and makes poss-
ible spaces for thinking anew.
These paintings are all rendered in a style that offers texture to the heaps of rubbish and mud that
is beautiful in its painterly detail. She smoothes the space by turning trash into glimmers of vibrancy,
thereby breaking out of the striated thinking of trash as something we should not see. In her inter-
view with China Central Television (CCTV), Xu states that by painting discarded items like those in
Wangjing Street and the Caochangdi series, she intended to aestheticize objects that are, more often
than not, overlooked by artists. This attention to society’s discarded objects points to the impact con-
sumer culture has on the landscape rather than relegating it to the margins. Xu brings trash from the
outskirts back to Beijing’s center via painted canvases displayed in galleries and museums. In so
doing, she is reversing flows of rubbish and altering assemblages.
Whereas some scholars like Wilke turn to Schneider to contend that landscape paintings “are
motivated by a compensatory longing for images of unspoiled nature” (2012, p. 106), Xu embraces
sullied nature in her work and exposes the effects of human egocentrism on the environment. Senses
of time collide in paintings where disposable plastic persistently reappears as part of the landscape.
Xu is smoothing the channels forged by consumption and progress and capturing what Peeples
(2011) calls “the toxic sublime,” which “produces dissonance by simultaneously showing beauty
and ugliness … [and] questions the role of the individual in the toxic landscape” (p. 377). This analy-
sis of Xu’s paintings extends Peeples’ work by considering painting and doing so in an international
context. This allows scholars to map how art challenges the “new myth [of productivism that] per-
petuates the values of progress, evolution, rationality, autonomy, expansionism, and so forth”
(Smith, 1998, p. 33). Smoothing creates space for thinking outside the striations of productivism.
The questioning of capitalism is a theme extending throughout China’s art world. Art critic Xu
Hong states that, “[a]s the population and the demand for material enjoyment grow, the environ-
ment in China is under great pressure, and the previous natural simplicity is gradually being replaced
by the artificiality of human surroundings” (Xu, 2009, p. 32). In documenting changes provoked by
China’s turn to consumer culture, Xu is helping to reimagine capitalism and industrialization as
dangerous consequential systems. She zooms in on trash, thereby challenging, or smoothing, the
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 7

concept of “progress,” which offers space for rethinking the relationship between humans, economic
systems, the landscape, disposable products, and the encroaching heaps of garbage. In this space lies
the possibility for the social to move and for human consciousness to change. If people inhabit the
smooth space created by a confrontation with Xu’s canvas and reconceptualize productivism as a
relationship between people and products fraught with problems, new spaces for being in the
world emerge. In the human-canvas assemblage lie possibilities of renegotiating human-product
relationships. This functions to extend Deleuze and Guattari’s theory by considering how art creates
space for social change.

Construction: shifting scales from many to millions

While Xu’s paintings of trash draw attention to the influence of consumerism on the landscape, her
paintings of construction sites expose how the scale of the changes taking place have severe conse-
quences. With its rapid industrialization as well as massive population, China is the perfect case
study for challenging the notion that a shift from rural to urban lifestyles is progress. Her paintings
open up space for contemplating what exactly is left in the wake of the move toward urban centers
and 24/7-time (Grebowicz, 2014). In recent years, people are confronting landscapes outlined by
buildings rather than mountains and smog sometimes so thick that one cannot see across the street.
Xu’s paintings skillfully provoke a sustained tension between what is habitually considered to be a
metamorphosis to modernization and the violence of heavy construction, thereby creating smooth
space for viewers to enter and draw lines of flight that may take them to new places and reconsider
their relationships within their assemblage.
To understand these changes, I first want to take a brief foray into history that considers China’s
turn to socialism in 1949. Relationships between Chinese people and the land were radically altered
during the Maoist era. Shapiro calls this period “an example of extreme human interference in the
natural world in an era in which human relationships were also unusually distorted” (2001, p. 1).
Mao’s teachings, policies, and practices advanced the idea that the land and natural resources con-
tained therein were to be used to create a “socialist utopia” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 3). As a result, wide
swaths of forest were chopped down to make room for farming and rivers were dammed in an effort
to harness hydropower, leading to floods and mass starvation. The idea that humans and nature were
separate and distinct and nature was something meant to be conquered proliferated, changing the
relationship people had with the land. When this line of thinking met with China’s turn to capitalism
and rapid expansion, further disasters ensued including droughts and desertification. The realization
that these environmental tragedies were linked to human activity ultimately interrupted the idea that
humans could control nature.
However, when Mao died in 1976, the practices of human rule over nature persisted. Thus, when
Deng Xiaoping initiated China’s economic reforms in the late 1970s, anthropocentrism aided in the
spread of consumerism and capitalism. Decisions were made in accordance with a human timescale
(Phillips, 2014), and China’s growth was accelerated. China’s “crest of transformation [was] one
hundred times the scale, and ten times the speed, of the first Industrial Revolution, which created
modern Britain” (Osnos, 2014, p. 4). Within the last 20 years, large metropolises in China including
Beijing and Shanghai have seen astronomical population growth to well over 20 million people. As of
2014, China had over 221 cities with populations that exceed one million people. Experts predict that
by 2025 70% of China’s 1.35 billion people will live in cities.
The speed of Beijing’s transformation and remnants of Maoist anthropocentrism are challenged
in Xu’s paintings of construction sites, which question the changes occurring as progress, and ask
people to reconsider their relationship with construction. In Mister Simple Moves the Mountain
No. 1, a giant mud mountain fills the canvas, leaving little sky. In the foreground, at the bottom
of the mountain, are structures built of blue rebar extending ever upward, but with no semblance
of a unified or solid foundation. White PVC pipes create lines between disparate structures.
Above this, a handful of workers in hardhats carry materials, dig, and build. The scene is messy,
8 E. A. BRUNNER

full of tangled lines and haphazardly placed supplies. The painting is foreshortened, which creates a
compacting of space typical of ancient Chinese ink paintings. The anonymous workers are painted
with either their backs to the viewer or featureless faces reminiscent of traditional landscape paint-
ings where small figures can be found meandering on mountainsides. The workers’ relationship with
the land, however, is quite different—these people are actively trying to change the mountain. In
encountering this painting in which relationships are created between the past, present, humans,
and mountains, lies the potential for a smoothing of space and a reimaging of relationships that dis-
rupts anthropocentrism.
Xu’s Mr. Simple Moves the Mountain series connects one of Mao’s parables with the construction
occurring today. The title is an allusion to the story, “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the
Mountains.” Many students during the Maoist era were required to memorize this tale in which
the “foolish old man” sets his mind on leveling two mountains using only a bucket. The townspeople
were skeptical, deeming the man “foolish” for attempting such a ridiculous feat. But the man kept at
the task with dogged persistence, eventually achieving what others considered impossible. This story
was meant to inspire Chinese peasants across the country to transform swamps and mountains alike
into productive farmland. This story and “[t]he spirit of the Foolish Old Man … was credited with
transforming Chinese landscapes by inspiring backbreaking physical sacrifices and communal
effort” (Shapiro, 2001, p. 103). By invoking this story, Xu is connecting contemporary unchecked
construction and development to the blindness encouraged by this parable and portraying a scene
in which people are no longer using buckets, but heavy equipment, which makes the leveling of
mountains much faster and transformations much riskier. She is interrupting the striated thinking
of the parable by illustrating what happens when communism, speed, and capitalism collide, creating
the potential for a shift in human consciousness that could reconfigure relationships between people,
cranes, technology, and productivism.
Similar themes are also evident in the painting, Exploit. The seven large cranes in the background
are not constructing one high rise, but a neighborhood of high rises. The influx of people to Beijing
necessitates ever-higher high rises and housing projects that can accommodate the entire population
of small US cities in a single building. The construction workers that dot the landscapes of partially
built projects likely traveled far distances to seek an opportunity to make money in Beijing, bringing
their families with them. They are just one force motivating the very expansion they are helping to
construct. These laborers are in visual conversation with the heavy equipment and building materials
strewn about the canvas. Xu combines people and the environment in an inextricably tangled knot of
relationships by melding people with bulldozers and construction sites with the dull tall towers in the
background that house Beijing’s over 23 million residents. In the image people are, on one hand, con-
quering the land to make way for people. On the other hand, their figures are so small and anonymous
that they are engulfed and overwhelmed by the scene. In choosing to portray people as small, Xu inter-
rupts the striations of anthropocentrism that fuel the fire of careless consumerism while gesturing to
past relationships with the landscape. People are building without contemplating the destruction, and
the high rises remaking the landscape should create pause for concern. This painting exposes rifts in
the sleek façade of progress as a super slogan, thereby opening up a striated-becoming-smooth space
for viewers to rethink whether rapid urbanization is a path they should continue to forge.
Xu’s series of Bridge paintings capture the creation of the fifth ring road, which evidences another
important change taking place in Beijing concurrent with the modernization of the city—the rise in
car culture. As the number of middleclass citizens in China has risen, people have moved from riding
bikes and scooters to driving cars and SUVs creating a huge demand for a dense system of roads as
well as a different speed of life. By capturing the construction of this ever-expanding highway system
in Beijing, Xu is capturing the deterritorialization and reterritorialization of farmland to asphalt and
pausing in the middle before the cars begin racing by in a place where bikes are disappearing and
time is changing. In this space of change—of an unfinished highway overpass in which cars are
absent—lies not one path, but a “lack of direction” in which possibilities are limitless. China does
not have to develop like this. Relationships between dirt, cars, and construction can shift.
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 9

Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are of great use to environmental scholars here because they ask
us to consider nature and humans not as separate, but rather as intertwined assemblages in constant
flux. These paintings of spaces inhabited by bulldozers, helmet-clad workers, rebar, and mud are an
important strategic choice. Construction sites are an ideal location for thinking anew. These land-
scapes are smooth-becoming-striated and striated-becoming-smooth spaces because they are sites
where the assemblages of land, people, progress, machinery, buildings, and national pride are chan-
ging. Xu has captured places of transition where people have come in and erased features of the space
but done so before the new project is complete. By emphasizing the scale and speed of construction,
she underscores the exigency of environmental issues while contrasting it with the speed of life before
industrialization by gesturing to dynastic landscape paintings.

Cyclical and linear time collide

The conflicting senses of time harbored by Western linear progress and Chinese cyclical time is
another recurring theme in Xu’s work, and their collision opens up the possibility for new conscious-
nesses to emerge. Xu addresses this tension through a combination of subject matter and technique.
Stylistically, much of her work pays respect to Chinese ink paintings of serene and secluded moun-
tains—of an era where time was cyclical. Traditional painting’s influence can be seen in the flatness
of some paintings previously mentioned as well as the turn to black and white in her Moving Scenery
series. Xu Hong describes Xu’s work as employing the “grandeur” of landscape paintings, but sim-
ultaneously depicting “the situation of human beings dissociating from … nature,” time, and space
(2009, p. 33). The concept of nature, time, and space depicted in ancient landscape paintings is very
different from the contemporary construction and the changing landscape of Beijing, which is in
fast-forward mode, and the presence of both traditional (stylistically) and changing (composition-
ally) China in her paintings creates new smooth-becoming-striated spaces to consider time in
relation to the environment. Time is an important concept contemplated by environmental scholars,
as our understanding and use of it can impact how we interact with our environment, how we under-
stand climate change, and how we treat our natural resources (Grebowicz, 2014; Phillips, 2014). In
creating a rift in the sense of time, Xu is giving viewers the space to contemplate how such different
understandings of time affect our interactions with our surroundings. Spaces are easily striated as
speed shatters cyclical motions toward linear progress.
Xu’s Moving Scenery paintings, which evoke cyclical time in the face of linear progress, can be
subdivided into two categories. The first category of paintings (Moving Scenery Nos. 1, 2, 3, and
4) causes construction sites to collide. In Moving Scenery No. 1, the background features a construc-
tion site painted in dull grays. The land, the people, the crane, the building project, and the smoke
billowing out of the house in the background all meld together in a distant drabness. Interrupting the
foreground is an enormous scoop of a crane carrying another scene of construction in its shovel. This
scene is a smaller replica of an earlier painting, Bridge 2007–4, and is painted in rich ochers, reds,
blacks, and blues. The crane is jarringly disproportionate and seems to come from nowhere. The col-
lision of what appears to be a construction project set in the past is violently ripped apart by a mod-
ern piece of heavy equipment. Time here is presented as cyclical, as a series of construction projects
that overlap on top of one another, which questions the linearity of progress. In the space created by
this contradiction lies possibilities and potentialities. The Chinese word for contradiction is 矛盾
(maodun), and has been used by writers such as Yu Hua (2012) to help make sense of the massive
changes China is experiencing. This concept of contradiction is useful because conflict begets move-
ment, which creates space for thinking anew. The resulting lines of flight have the potential to lead to
other open spaces, systems, modes of being, assemblages, and ways of considering nature.
The violent pace of “progress” in China is also evident in a second category of paintings: Moving
Scenery-Panda 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, which depict classic portrayals of China—from the Great Wall to
Maoist Revolutionary posters—in the distant gray background with decontextualized cranes ripping
them apart to insert colorful pandas clinging to trees or traipsing through rivers. In Moving Scenery-
10 E. A. BRUNNER

Panda 3, the faces of young Chinese people wearing Mao hats and holding Mao’s little red book can
be seen yelling in the background, raising their hands and books high. Rather than being depicted in
contrasting army green and red, these young comrades are rendered in subdued grays and tans. The
sky above them is dull and flat. The large scoop of a crane painted in a bright red and carrying a pair
of pandas in a lush green setting enters from the right side of the canvas. This image creates a clash of
practices, faces, and worlds. It makes apparent relationships between things that are rarely connected
in common environmental discourses including the relationship between pandas and Maoist phil-
osophy. The natural landscape is interrupting the people-dominated canvas. Pandas are walking
through a world of green grass and bamboo, and this disturbs the black and white painted past
that was dominated by Mao and his faithful followers. This return of nature suggests a new assem-
blage that does not fight for human rule over nature, but which connects to pandas and rocks and
streams and China’s flora and fauna. By placing the people in the past and bringing the natural habi-
tat to the foreground, Xu makes room for new ways of contemplating the interaction between what
has been for so long considered to be two disparate worlds—humans and nature—and asking if they
should remain divided.
In these paintings, the viewer witnesses the collision of past and present, which challenges a linear
sense of time and reinforces cyclical time where spaces have the potential for change. Viewers are in a
space where present and past overlap. The bulldozers are not just changing the landscape or the cul-
ture, they are also changing Xu’s work. In this space of contradiction and change sits a striated-
becoming-smooth-becoming-striated sense of time. As Deleuze and Guattari (1987) write, “It is at
the same time that lines of flight connect and continue their intensities,” and collisions cause inter-
ruptions. Maodun and movement is everywhere. This allows Xu’s work to offer space for smooth-
becomings, in which concepts of progress, time, and human–nature divides can be questioned and
the world reordered.

Conclusion: strategically smoothing new spaces

Tension and change are rife throughout Xu’s work, and these dominant themes reflect what is cur-
rently happening in Chinese culture—old values and new values are colliding to create this space of
uncertainty driven by economic growth, but held back by a reticence to wholeheartedly adopt Wes-
tern consumptive ways. China does not need to inhabit Western striations and can forge its own
path. Xu’s work takes up a middle ground, creating a striated-becoming-smooth space of possibility.
Viewers must decide how to striate it, as they inevitably will. As China continues to change and
struggle with the differences between its history and the present shifts in values and thought,
close attention to what lies in the in-between can help to hold on to the tensions between traditional
values and new consumptive practices and forge future smooth spaces of opportunity. It is in this
middle space where progress, industrialization, and time are questioned that potentialities for change
are most abundant. However, as Deleuze and Guattari (1987) remind us, “smooth spaces are not in
themselves liberatory. But the struggle is changed or displaced in them and life reconstitutes its
stakes, confronts new obstacles, invents new spaces, switches adversaries” (p. 500). Looking to art
can open up new directions and, in Xu’s work, expose the weaknesses of the hegemony of producti-
vism by bringing the margins to the foreground, by giving us a map that leads us into deterritoria-
lized spaces before they are reterritorialized by the capitalist machine, and by placing us in a space of
maodun. Xu’s work exposes obstacles the Chinese people are confronting, the shifting ideas about
nature, and the doubting of development as progress. While we should “Never believe that a smooth
space will suffice to save us” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 500) we can look to it to see how it is being
reterritorialized. This analysis utilizes this theory to draw attention to the importance of mapping
movement and changes in human consciousness, to think of humans in relationship with their sur-
roundings in an effort to move away from a division between humans and “nature,” and to recon-
sider the taken for granted assumptions that undergird the valuing of capitalist practices including a
linear sense of time.
 ENVIRONMENTAL COMMUNICATION 11

The better we understand (1) that new spaces for understanding the relationship between the
environment and consumptive practices are being opened up in China and (2) that these spaces
can help to cultivate new directions outside the dominant path of Western progress, the better we
can work together to imagine new worlds of eco-friendly cities, reduced consumption, and strategi-
cally lowered economic growth goals. Imagining is the first step toward making change, and China is
changing. People in cities across the country are protesting for safer living environments, even if it
means saying no to higher GDP. By understanding how art is able to smooth striations and open up
space for re-imagining our relationships with commerce and nature, we can better understand the
role of the visual in provoking change. Finally, as China’s art market continues to grow and environ-
mental issues become an increasingly dominant theme, art’s political role in creating change
becomes more and more salient. Art’s ability to interrupt deeply embedded ways of thinking
helps break us out of striated spaces, creating new connections between people and their environ-
ment, government, and economy, and also creates the potential for new connections between the
US and China in which we can help and learn from each other in efforts toward a more sustainable
future.

Notes
1. A growing number of artists are using their work to comment on China’s rapid urbanization and its impacts on
the people, land, culture, and customs including Liu Jiahua, Xu Weixin, and Wang Shaolun.
2. Hutongs are traditional Chinese neighborhoods that consist of single-family homes tightly packed together on
narrow streets.
3. I turn to these two French philosophers in this analysis of Chinese art for two major reasons. First, because
many of their theories and ideas including the rhizome and war machine were inspired, in part, by a confronta-
tion with China (see Deleuze (2005) and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, pp. 18–19, 20, 386, and 404–
405) and, second, because Deleuze, in particular, engaged with art in a sustained manner throughout his career
(See Francis Bacon: The logic of sensation).
4. This work is especially important in China, where levels of environmental awareness have remained relatively
low until recently due to (1) poverty and lack of education and (2) the embrace of economic development at any
cost.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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